Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @09:12AM
from the it's-always-political dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a blog post by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, founder of corporate watchdog SumOfUs.org and partner of the late Aaron Swartz:
"The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron's prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright. I was going to start that last paragraph with 'In a stunning turn of events,' but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it's really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron's effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn't believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn't really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want. But this HuffPo article, and what I’m hearing from sources on the Hill, suggest that that’s not true. That Ortiz and Heymann knew exactly what they were doing: Shutting up, and hopefully locking up, an extremely effective activist whose political views, including those on copyright, threatened the Powers That Be."

Until this country creates and enforces better anti-bullying laws that do not exempt government officials, no one will be held accountable. It's very, very sad that this young man took his life away over this (Never ever give up! Ever!). No matter how you view this case, the bottom line is a human life is gone because of frickin' copy protection statutes!! Very sad, there needs to be change. Enough lives have been damaged already. $600,000 fines for trading a few songs on a file sharing site? A13 year old girl is fined thousands of dollars because she liked and wanted to dance to a song she liked and "illegally" downloaded?? A young man without proper coping skills facing 30+ years in jail because he thought charging 10 cents a page for documents paid for by tax dollars should be free??!!! While murdererers and rapists are given minimal sentences for their true crimes. On the face of it, it is all quite insane.

They didn't. They said an arguably political paper "played a role in the prosecution" . They don't consider the paper political or they don't consider it the whole motivation. It's a short paper, probably worth reading so you can make up your own mind how wrong they were.

Exactly. In particular, what they said was that due to this manifesto of his, they believed that his intent was to make the documents he was downloading publicly available - that is, violate the copyright by redistributing them. In other words, he publicly said, "We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks," and was in the process of doing said downloading. They had reasonable cause to believe that his intention was to upload these papers to file sharing networks, in violation of the law, as stated in his manifesto. While his intention to break the law might have been "politically motivated," the prosecution was based on his stated intention to break additional laws, not on silencing his political beliefs.

Intent to break the law is not breaking the law.
You {don't / can't / ought not} prosecute "intention to break additional laws". The only activities than ought to be prosecuted ought to be actual breaking of laws. Mens rea is just a part of it. Intention without action is not breaking the law.

you know what's worse than a conspiracy? a peon(prosecutor) who thinks there is a conspiracy and acting on as if there was one and as if he/she would be rewarded for being a dick in order to further that conspiracy.

an actual conspiracy has planning and bullying schwartz didn't really help the powers that be at all.. yet the prosecution thought that for some fucked up reason they should do their thing. like a soldier committing mass murder of random people of some ethnic distinction because he thinks that's

A HuffingtonPost (not exactly your objective source) article claimed that the DOJ "admitted it". This was picked up by the OP's cited source which then added its own spin:UPDATE #2: A DOJ official says (in the outlet “Broadcasting & Cable,” an odd choice if you ask me) that my characterization of the prosecution as “political” is inaccurate. No argument as to why or how, so color me unconvinced.

It's not at all shocking that it was politically motivated. What's shocking is that they admitted it.

They didn't. The blog post is a really biased interpretation of the article it is commenting upon.

What was actually said is that the manifesto was taken into account because it was evidence of his intent to distribute the papers he downloaded. Now, I personally agree with Aaron's views, but if you consider the current copyright law just as it is, it's perfectly acceptable to use that manifesto as evidence that his motives was to commit widespread copyright violations. There's nothing political about it in the sense of "we need to shut this guy up." In the way the law is currently written, what he wanted to do is illegal. That's why Aaron himself called it civil disobedience in his manifesto.

That said, the whole, "we can get you for a maximum sentence of 30 years, but we'll agree to a plea bargain of 3 months" is really bullshit, and I'd really like to see it go away. We all agree that 30 years for downloading and distributing some digital files is unacceptable, and the DoJ's excuse is, "well, we weren't really going to imprison him for that long. It was going to be 3 months, and his lawyer might even successfully argue for no jail time." That's not the point. The point is that the maximum sentence should be set to a reasonable value, so that it can't be used to blackmail someone into plea bargaining.

Of course they can admit it was political. There's no downside to this for them. They can't be successfully sued, and no one will ever be held personally responsible.

"Yeah, we did it for political reasons. But, we didn't use a drone. It just turned out that our unreasonable tactics were extremely effective. And the taxpayers should be happy that they didn't get the bill for a large public trial."

I know a professional who would disagree with you about personal responsibility. He has made his living for the last ~30 years providing people with a very final dose of personal responsibility. All it takes is someone willing to pay for his services.

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".

But the terrifying fact I'm trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: According to the DOJ's testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn't like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making "an example" out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.

This is awful. The idea that copyright (and in fact ideas about copyright) should be enforced as vigorously as this is absurd.

America has started doing show trials now of people who haven't committed crimes on the basis that their ideas are radical and dangerous?

The copyright lobby has won, apparently. And doing anything contrary to their wishes will cause the government to go after you.

Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here. I'm not sure how free of a society you can be when commercial interests lead to something like this.

This is awful. The idea that copyright (and in fact ideas about copyright) should be enforced as vigorously as this is absurd.

No, you're wrong. That's not what this is about.

This is about a policy in which political propaganda is held above human life, liberty, rights, the law, everything. A policy by which goals are set and the rest is just a front. This is a government that lies to the people and that works against their interests, that fights against the will of change, that uses selective force of law and mock-law to suppress ideas and ideals.

This is the same tyranny as gun control, global warming, and stem cell research: things we either can't know without major amounts of research or just can't know period, because the political views have covered up and even shaped the facts. Global warming is the biggest offender: we can cite stem cell research and see what was adult and embryonic, even though that's usually left out of casual activism (a lot of embryonic stem cell proponents point to "stem cell research" using adult stem cells); but with global warming, any research about the trends, the causes, and the impacts not following the political dogma is actively prevented as a first line of defense, and then picked apart and ridiculed by measures that would similarly debase current consensus. The same one-side slant is applied to everything, to varying degrees of effectiveness, regardless of whether the dogma is accurate with reality or completely fantastic.

This is the same with copyright. The media and the government want to provide a slanted view of copyright, to ridicule and debase research contrary to their position, to hide all research that doesn't contradict but does show the other impacts (weak copyright DOES hurt business; but it also GREATLY improves the wealth of society by slipping works into the hands of consumers after a shorter time, and by reducing punishments to not be retaliatory and destructive but rather simply just). They have set out to destroy their opponents to cover the important facts that must be brought to the public mind.

This is the same tyranny as gun control, global warming, and stem cell research: things we either can't know without major amounts of research or just can't know period, because the political views have covered up and even shaped the facts

Welcome to the real world. However, the sky isn't falling. People still can buy guns, the US hasn't adopted stifling European-style global warming policies, and stem cell research is still legal. Fair use is still more liberal in the US than anywhere, and you're less likel

This is the same tyranny as gun control, global warming, and stem cell research: things we either can't know without major amounts of research or just can't know period, because the political views have covered up and even shaped the facts.

You're veering into lunacy with that one.

Global warming is a fact (basically all respected scientists agree on this one). It is not a tyraanny, a political movement, conspiracy (either liberal or conservative) a policy or any other thing you may choose to accuse it of. It is a scientific fact. The global mean temperature is rising.

Lots of people with an axe to grind like to pretend it's a political thing and that there is a political "dogma", but the science is pretty clear at this point.The fact is the fact. Politics surround it, but that does not change the nature of it.

Because so what if they admitted it? Is anyone going to be held responsible or punished for it? No. At most there might be a slap on the wrist (NOT for the prosecution, but for letting it get out of hand), then it will be business as usual.

Remember, all the rules are there just for the plebs, not for the elites in the ruling class.

"If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research."

As someone mentioned, it's not shocking the prosecution was politically motivated but shocking that they admitted it. I'll add that it's also not shocking that they think they didn't do anything wrong!

Whether we tolerate computer fraud or not is a political choice. Whether we tolerate some kinds of copyright violations or not is a political choice. Whether we tolerate drug use or not is a political choice. Whether we tolerate illegal immigration or not is a political choice.

The people elected a president and Congress that were clearly going to be tough on compute fraud and copyright violations, while they also elected a president that was going to be lenient on immigration. The DOJ translates those polit

If you are innocent but a little dangerous the system overreacts and goes into bug squish mode. I didn't have the resources to defend myself without being driven to poverty, I am not too big or important to fail, the perfect target. My crime is being invited by a friends kid to give a first aid and rope safety class to some tree worshiping hippies after a fatality, that got me into the sights of a federal prosecutor as a enviro-terrorist. I found out thanks to a college friend in the prosecutors office. I am a natural born in the continental US citizen, fortunately with an inherited second passport, I had the resources to go expat rather than gamble what the feds would do with their new DHS/patriot act powers.Is my life good now, sure, but I still feel that I can not ever visit the US until there is massive change.

Remember when it came out, that the FBI actively worked with the banks, to forcibly (and illegally anyway) shut the movement down? They added agents provocateurs, false flag operations, and sowed the seed of conflict, to get them to fall apart.

The *exact* same thing happened to Wikileaks.

There's a highly active and highly powerful force in the USA, that shuts down everyone and everything that goes against he enforced groupthink or doesn't let them distract him.

It's why there are no real other parties, why the media only focuses on two views that are virtually the same and are portrayed as the most extreme differences there could be, and it's especially the reason why there aren't constant riots and attempts to overthrow the dictatorial government, even though it's ripe since a looong time.

The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Insecurity, the TSA, the NSA, and especially those most powerful government agencies no-one has ever heard of but which somehow are involved in everything. They're all part of it.

And the people live in extreme schizophrenic denial, flee to the delusions of religion, the reality distortion of the "American dream", and the lies of the "free market".

DoJ Admits Aaron Swartz's prosecution was political! The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron's prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright!

... but then you go to the article and see the quote and it's:

A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

Doesn't sound quite the same as "admitting it's political". In fact, let's see what the HuffPo said:

... yeah. Sorry, Submitter, but we mock that kind of Gotcha Journalism when Fox News or Breitbart twists someone's words to make a splashy headline, or when James O'Keefe does one of his out-of-context videos to smear Planned Parenthood.

The story was reported yesterday on Hacker News, and the headline on/. is just as sensational as it was in the other forum.

There is no admission, and there is no source. The anonymous staffer who will not be named is some underling with no pull or sway, and nobody has resigned. He didn't even say what the headline claims he said.

Of course, the prosecution was motivated by his views on copyright, just like the prosecution of a pot grower is motivated by their views on growing pot. What people still don't seem to get is that the DOJ position represents the majority view of the elected representatives, both on copyright and on computer fraud.

...so you deal with him as an idealogue. I happen to agree with Schwaz's ideology when it comes to open and free access to information, especially information that was accumulated via tax-funded research. My tax dollars are also funding those prosecutors, though -- I want to make sure that if they are going after an ideologue (even one that I happen to agree with) they aren't hampered in the process, because there are other ideologues out there that I would like to see swing if they (like Schwarz did) tri

But hey, lets just take an out of context quote written in one of the worse online 'papers'(Huffpoo) and simply believe it becasue it agrees with a unproven cognitive bias.It's a political view blog. Not journalism. Its' a non paid for blog.

An article I read said that MIT reacted to JSTOR complaints. It seems from what I have read that JSTOR wanted MIT to be the bad cop while they repeatedly made public statements about how they were willing to let him off. It appears that their PR people may have learned from the Adobe - Sklyarov [wikipedia.org] incident.

In that case, Adobe initiated the case and actively pushed it until the public outcry hit. Then they quickly backed off and claimed they asked for his release. It is impossible to say what really goes on behind closed doors, but the fact that the DOJ refused to drop the case is telling. I have always believed that they backpedaled publicly but kept pushing for prosecution behind closed doors. That way, everything would be perfect: They would get to punish Sklyarov and also hoodwink the public into thinking they were good or at least not so bad.

JSTOR was probably afraid of weathering the ire of the internet but still wanted him punished as an example. Pushing MIT to be the bad cop would accomplish this goal perfectly. MIT could take the heat, and JSTOR would get its crucifiction. Perfect.

Why does the discussion always center around suicide and Aaron's courage or lack of it? It is now obvious that the Department of Injustice was actually out to get him. It is also now clear that they targeted him for his views and not his actions. Given these facts, how can we -- netizens, citizens of the USA, citizens of the world, humans... take your pick -- allow entities like JSTOR and PACER to continue to exist? And why are we not looking for the people who orchestrated this fiasco (as opposed to the lowly public servants who coldly executed their wishes in obvious contravention of their oaths of office and their duties to the Constitution and people of the US and the world)?

Where are the executives of JSTOR who clandestinely pulled strings to bring on this relentless and unmerited legal assault? Why was the mysterious JSTOR "contact" who complained repeatedly to MIT officials and asked them to take action not identified? Directly or indirectly, JSTOR is responsible for this tragic death. When are they going to apologize or try to make things right? When is the information Aaron sought going to be available to us all? When are we going to ban JSTOR and PACER's theft from the public? When are JSTOR and PACER going to return their ill gotten gains to the people whose documents they stole?

For those who will make the argument: Copying is not theft. Keeping people from accessing things they rightfully own or should have access to is. A car is stolen when the owner cannot use it anymore, not when the same model is produced again by the factory. The owners of these documents are all the members of the public. Denying access to anyone for any reason is theft.

They're political because criminal law is political -- it is the outcome of a political process, legislative lawmaking.

They're political because prosecutors are political; in many (most?) places in the US the county attorney is a directly elected position, and the person who wins that job has an inherently political mindset and at minimum a public constituency, and in practice, a much larger private constituency -- police, judges, politicians, etc. Even in situations where the position isn't directly elected, it's arguably more political because the positions are appointed by politicians and are often at an elevated political level (eg, assistant US attorney).

And then there's the power political component -- prosecutorial power, is, like many forms a power more or less depending on how you exercise it. So there's an element of wanting to use prosecutorial power in a way that enhances it rather than detracts from it, and that generally means winning, so you pick easier targets.

I really wish somebody would just link to an original story. This may be Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to know about everything going on with copyright, but I can't be the only one who doesn't know off-hand what the story is with Aaron Swartz. I'm even at least 50% sure I am aware of this story, but the name alone doesn't bring the whole thing back. In the future, please, just a little reminder at least.

Evidently not. You are asserting that a young man's suicide was merely a political statement, and an ineffective one at that. Such a statement bears no relation to a modern understanding of depression and suicide.

No, the modern understanding is that even when you succeed at life you can still fall into a depression. And the modern understanding is also that depression is a disorder where the brain chemistry and functions change in a measurable way. If the technology existed to easily sample brain chemistry levels, that is how depression would be diagnosed. There are studies that have found that you can diagnose and differentiate different types of depressions with fMRI, which may be the way it is diagnosed in the fu

People bringing up charges against you FAR IN EXCESS of the crime committed mean he was more like "pushed" into depression.

The charges were increased because he had a LEGAL viewpoint that cause the people passing laws to CHANGE THEIR MINDS. So he did EXACTLY what they intended, and those new Internet anti- bullying laws should be used.

They got wast they wanted, he's shut up. They know nothing will happen because they do this for a living.

You either have no ability to feel empathy for your fellow man, or you're just a bitter old bastard who's too stupid to understand that the racial slurs he's throwing at the brown people are insulting. Either way, you're an idiot.

I grew up with depression, and I suffer with it every day of my life. It is a disease, its a mental issue. There were people like you once, who threw people like me into mental institutions because you couldn't understand. You didn't want to understand, to deal with it. It was easier to just say "you're weak!" and lock them up.

People who find themsevles in these sort of situations are not fully responsible for their own actions. They view what they're doing as the right thing to do, no matter how wrong that actually is, because the pain they're feeling is distorting their world view. If someone held a red hot iron against your arm for a few hours, you'd suddenly find yourself wishing you were dead, you'd want the pain to stop, you'd be screaming for mercy. It's no different here, only the pain is not physical, and it takes way longer than a few hours to reach that point.

Every waking moment spent dreading, being afrade, being a burden, knowing at you and you alone are at fault for all of it. You dont eat because you think you're fat and horrible. You eat too much because you use it as an escape from the pain you feel. You cant stand living anymore because everywhere you look you seem to make life worse, not just for you, but for those you love and care about. You rob someone because you lose the path needed, nobody gives you want you need and you dont know how to earn it yourself, you're desperate, and you need what they have, even if you dont.

You dont have an empathy deficiency disorder, you're just a fucking jerk.

Remember he admitted it was him, he surrendered his equipment without warrants, etc.

Everything about what was done to him was wrong, but this was seriously fucking stupid. Don't admit anything. Don't even admit you were there. Nuke everything. Better to be harassed for concealing evidence (and if there's no evidence, how can they prove you destroyed anything incriminating?) than to be raped for not even committing a crime.

Civil disobedience of that calibre isn't punished with 30 years of gulag. Except maybe back when Stalin was still alive. It's punished with fines in civilized world, and maybe short term prison in 3rd world.

After Stalin died, even in USSR they didn't push for those kinds of punishments for that calibre of "civil disobedience".

Worth noting that current for profit prisons are arguably worse then gulags. On one hand, you have better conditions (i.e. no risk of freezing to death during winters), on the other hand many prisoners helped each other in gulags because they were all in it together.

Ugh. I disagree with the AC troll you're responding to but I find your post just as distasteful. I sincerely doubt that Schwartz's suicide has much to do with medical depression. Undoubtedly the situation would have made him depressed -- facing life in prison would make anyone depressed -- but I'm inclined to believe that he committed suicide because he 1) thought he would lose 2) decided that a life in a cell wasn't worth living. That's not a disease, that's a conscious decision that's actually pretty logi

Life isn't that bad, it's all in your perspective, you gotta look for the good in life, keep up a good attitude. It's not easy, lot of bad in the world gets reported, because bad news sells papers. You need to develop a better outlook on life son. If you only look for thae bad, that is all you will see, get me? I hope you will have a better day now.:-)

Ajd, to rebut those negative lyrics, I gift to you and all here, Monty Python. Sounds to me like you need this...

Keep in mind that you're talking about a kid here, one who in the typical American fashion had been raised on idealism and "good government bullshit" (to quote Goodfellas). It's quite likely he had no idea going in just how hard the government can push back when citizens threaten corporate interests.

It's real easy to envision yourself a hero when you embark on a fight against the man. But when confronted with the very harsh reality that you are engaging in the fight largely alone and against all odds, it can be overwhelming.

He is of course wrong in this view, and the govt was going to remind him that yes, computer/copyright law still applies, even to geniuses and prodigies.

Yet he could have raped and murdered someone and would have faced a lesser penalty. Maybe he was willing to accept the consequences of his actions, assuming that they were constitutional under the eighth amendment, which guarantees that excessive penalties wouldn't be levied against him.

Making examples of people isn't justice. Furthermore, Schwartz's actions are comparable to those who fought segregation because in both cases the crimes they committed weren't just ethical, they were actions taken because they felt ethically compelled to do so. You may say that segregation is an obvious evil whereas research paid for by government grants being kept private/patented/non-free is not, but during America's struggle with civil rights, there was nothing obvious about the evil of segregation. Just ask Barry Goldwater.

That's part of the issue. If you break the TOS, you have voided the contract granting permission to access a computer system. If you access it, you are accessing a computer system without authorisation - a criminal offence in the US under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Legally, it's really no different from cracking your way in. That's why the maximum penalty he was threatened with was so high, and why there is such an outcry: The law used was not intended to criminalise violating a website TOS, but it implicitly does just that.

Your description is perhaps valid for his use of the wireless network. But on the wired network, he didn't lose legitimate access by violating the TOS, he never had legitimate access in the first place.

The point isn't that he was prosecuted, it was that A) he was prosecuted beyond any reasonable interpretation of the wrongdoing B) the prosecutor drew up a huge list of charges to try and scare him into taking a plea C) the reasons for A and B, it has just been admitted by the DOJ, were political. That shouldn't happen in the US, it just shouldn't. There shouldn't even be the shadow of a possibility that it could possibly have happened.

The thing is, he really didn't break the law, he took freely available, public domain documents from JSTOR and published them on the internet so that the public didn't have to pay 10 cents per page to get access to them. The law being used against him was the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), specifically the section that was put in for ATMs. Lawyers creatively turned this section of the CFAA to apply to terms of service agreements by saying the 10 cents per page was a network based "financial transaction." Basically, they used a law that was never designed for a networked computing based world and applied it to a network computing based world. The same law basically bans the world wide web, requiring you to have explicit permission to visit any computer on the internet, so congratulations on committing several felonies by browsing today.

Drive down any highway in the United States. If the Speed Limit is 70 mph, the troopers aren't pulling over every car going 71 mph and up. They are pulling over whom they choose to pull over; sometimes its the guy going 85, sometimes its the car going 71 and "happens" to be driven by a minority.

Police departments throughout the United States don't have a history of profiling or racism through selective application of the law. What happened to Swartz is no different; just at a higher level.

Who would have expected publicly defying the law would motivate prosecutors to come down hard on a suspect?

The "law" was a TOS/AUP. Are you saying you've never violated any of the terms of a network or website's TOS/AUP? I strongly doubt that you even read them (nobody else does either.. you may remember the game vendor who included a term ceding ownership of the user's soul to the publisher [foxnews.com], and nobody even noticed). Do you agree that violating any of those terms ("defying the law", as you phrase it) should be treated as a felony?

Yeah, you know... Jesus carried his own cross to his crucifixion, so you can't blame his death entirely on the Romans. He was mostly to blame for his own death. If he had just shut up when he was told to, he could have lived a long and happy life.

Funny, I have not seen any forced famines in the bible belt or conservatards and libertardians rounded up and sent to FEMA camps. I have not seen political rivals of Obama accidentally falling and landing head first on a bullet. You are full of shit and have no clue what Stalinism really is.